Question

I’m creating some code that will find a space between characters, and use the characters before the space and the ones after it. These characters are stored in a NSString. Here is what I have so far, however, it’s not seeing the empty character.

    NSString *tempTitle = self.title;
unsigned int indexOfSpace; // Holds the index of the character with the space
unsigned int titleLength = (unsigned int)self.title.length; // Holds the length of the title
for (unsigned int count = 0; count < titleLength; count++)
{
    if ([tempTitle characterAtIndex:count] == "") // If the character at the index is blank, store this and stop
    {
        indexOfSpace == count;
    }
    else // Else, we keep on rollin'
    {
        NSLog(@"We're on character: %c", [tempTitle characterAtIndex:count]);
    }
}

I’ve tried nil , empty string (“”) and ” ” but no avail. Any ideas?

Answer 1

Your space character should be in single quotes, not double quotes. Single quotes get you the char type in C. (Double quotes create a string literal, which essentially functions as a char * and will never pass your comparison.)

-[NSString characterAtIndex:] returns a type unichar, which is an unsigned short, so you should be able to compare this directly to a space character ' ', if that’s what you want to do.

Note that nil and empty string, are not useful here– neither are actually characters, and in any case your string will never “contain” these.

You should see also the NSString methods for finding characters in strings directly, e.g. -[NSString rangeOfString:] and its cousins. That prevents you from writing the loop yourself, although those are unfortunately a little syntactically verbose.